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<TITLE>PyMailCGI Main Page</TITLE>
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<H1 align=center>PyMailCGI</H1>
<H2 align=center>A POP/SMTP Web Email Interface</H2>
<P align=center><I>Version 3.0 June 2010 (2.0 January 2006)</I></P>

<table>

<tr><td><hr>
<h2>Actions</h2>
<P>
<UL>
<LI><a href="cgi-bin/onRootViewLink.py">View, Reply, Forward, Delete POP mail</a>
<LI><a href="cgi-bin/onRootSendLink.py">Send a new email message by SMTP</a>
</UL></P>

<tr><td><hr>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<P>
<A href="http://rmi.net/~lutz/about-pp.html">
<IMG src="ppsmall.gif" align=left
alt="[Book Cover]" border=1 hspace=10></A>
This site implements a simple web-browser interface to POP/SMTP email
accounts.  Anyone can send email with this interface, but for security
reasons, you cannot view email unless you install the scripts with your
own email account information, in your own server account directory.
PyMailCgi is implemented as a number of Python-coded CGI scripts that run on
a server machine (not your local computer), and generate HTML to interact
with the client/browser.  See the book <I>Programming Python, 4th Edition</I>
for more details.</P>

<tr><td><hr>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<P>Caveats: PyMailCgi 1.0 was initially written during a 2-hour layover at
Chicago's O'Hare airport.  This release is not nearly as fast or complete
as PyMailGUI (e.g., each click requires an Internet transaction, there
is no save operation or multithreading, and there is no caching of email
headers or already-viewed messages).  On the other hand, PyMailCgi runs on
any web browser, whether you have Python (and Tk) installed on your machine
or not.

<P>Also note that if you use these scripts to read your own email, PyMailCgi
does not guarantee security for your account password. See the notes in the
View action page as well as the book for more information on security policies.

<p><I><U>New in Version 2</U></I>: PyMailCGI now supports viewing and sending
Email attachments for a single user, and avoids some of the prior version's
exhaustive mail downloads. It only fetches message headers for the list page,
and only downloads the full text of the single message selected for viewing.

<p><I><U>New in Version 3</U></I>: PyMailCGI now runs on Python 3.X (only),
and employs many of the new features of the mailtools package: decoding and 
encoding of Internationalized headers, decoding of main mail text, and so on.
Due to a regression in Python 3.1's cgi and email support, version 3.0 does 
not support sending of binary or incompatibly-encoded text attachments, though
attachments on fetched mails can always be viewed (see Chapter 15 and 16).

<p>Also see:
<UL>
<li>The <I>PyMailGUI</I> program in the Internet directory, which
        implements a more complete client-side Python+Tk email GUI
<li>The <I>pymail.py</I> program in the Email directory, which
        provides a simple console command-line email interface
<li>The Python imaplib module which supports the IMAP email protocol
        instead of POP
</UL></P>
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<A href="http://rmi.net/~lutz/about-pp.html">[Book]</a>
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